Corsair Concocts Super Fast SandForce-Based SSD

In another nod towards the increasingly popular SandForce controller, Corsair today announced its Force Series SSDs built around SandForce.

"The Force Series are the fastest SSDs that Corsair has launched to date," stated Kevin Conley, Vice President of Engineering at Corsair. “We have been very impressed with the SandForce SSD Processor innovations in the months that we have been working with them, and we can’t wait to get these extraordinarily fast SSDs into the hands of our most demanding customers."

And fast they are, at least on paper. By combining the SandForce SF-1200 SSD processor with MLC flash memory, Corsair claims its new SSD line can race along at 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speeds.

These will be available in 100GB and 200GB capacities and come with TRIM support in Windows 7. No word yet on price or availability.

Comments

SSD suppliers are never going to recoup the money spent on R&D until they mass produce them and sell them at an affordable price and Capacity more in competition with mechanical hard drives. The idea I believe is to replace the mechanical hard drive in your mobile device and your home desktop and relegate the huge capacity and slower mechanical disk to server storage jobs and back up chores. This will never be realized however until costs come way down. Say $200 US Dollars for a super duper fast 512GB SSD with prices dropping from even there.

The only thing that is keeping prices way up is that there are only a few suppliers of the memory chips used in SSDs and controller chips have only 2 suppliers as far as I know. So until things change prices are going to be just too high.

This is all just too unfriendly to common competition. If we can get a glut of memory suppliers producing high performance memory chips for a very cheap price because they are making so much of it then things will come down in price and also the controller chips need more competition that will bring prices down.

The cost of producing a mechanical hdd is pennies yet is more involved than the solid state drive. So it would seem the SSD would be easier and cheaper to manufacture then a mechanical drive.

I believe that part of the problem with SSD pricing is just pure price fixing and greed. It's really hurting the advancement and adoption of the SSD.

I'd have to disagree I'm sure they are making decent money on these, maybe not enough to recoup the cost but they sell other things for that. People will buy these for whatever price point they set them at; hell if people will buy a $700 gtx 480 when they come out just because it says Nvidia what makes you think they won't be able to sell them at their current prices for the next 2-3 years. And there is tons of competition Intel, OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Mushkin, Samsung, Western Digital, and soon Seagate. This is more competition than the Hard Drive market and those prices have been steadily falling. The problem isn't competition it's that the controller chips and flash cost a lot. And 90% of mobile devices produced today do not use hdd in them.

When I mention competition I'm talking about the component suppliers such as the memory chips and the controllers. There are only a few suppliers of these parts. Since there are only a few suppliers of these parts then competition is low and prices are as high as they want them to be and since parts are expensive the drive makers are going to have to sell them for more money. They aren't making much money on SSD's as they have to Recoup on R&D and pay for the parts and assembly and marketing. So the only people actually making any money in this industry if you will would be the component suppliers such as the memory and controller suppliers.